H
e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s
b e r g
N
a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i
v e s E d i t i o n
ANNE WALDMAN
5
Female Poets Next To A Block Of Ice
(—Wrestle
the damn dream down!)
-
E.S.
This was the dream
where I left the
palm and stereo at home
left my fatigues at
home
I became lost in a Theatre of Reading
I was provoked by aggressive how-to book
titles bobbing out at me
as I passed the
(fluctuating) shelves
“Incapably Positive Chronicles”
“Received Ideas But In No Things Received”
“The President Is Not Projective Thirst
You Can Be Too”
“My Hands Are Tongue-Tied”
“More Than Laura Riding Knows”
I open a volume, hands shaking but my
condition ordered me to salute
Heil!
I felt like Queen Mab,
I wanted to eat nightshade
and ply the
spirits of poesia out of their caves
My sisters –all four of them –reminded me
of
the Library in Alexandria
– think of it before it’s sacking!
-(time is a spiral)
and suggested how one might behave
in such a place –
such a Memory
Palace, you need, girlfriends, to
bow
Joanne was seen polishing marble
Diane remained in samadhi
Alice had her glasses on to scrutinize a
miniature map
Eleni was eager for
the card catalogue, she started “And you?”
She was enceinte,
she held the future in a book
I was a lumpen
proletariat, a deadbeat, a shaman
I wanted him, the only librarian in the
room (snap fingers)
to be a nurturing
woman librarian
The world was askew how get it right again?
Stacks of glassine Duncan, Olson thin,
weathered Ginsberg,
his pages long
with hair
it wa s “all about” Spicer’s grail, the Enron scandal
It was “all about” death in war, torture
The empire of reading was clear
You needed special glasses provided by
Homeland Security
But here there was no “home”, there was
no “secure”
But something was going to change, get born.
[Originally
published in NHS 2005, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs05/anne_waldman.html.]